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The World Is a Museum
Excerpts from "The World is a Museum", written in 2014. Passage 1 Where does art live? Where do we encounter it? Most of us would tend to answer that art belongs in galleries and museums - perhaps even that the limited environmental context of art is part of what defines it. However, many of hte most recognizable, impactful, and dynamic pieces of artwork the world over are not contained within the walls of museums, but out in public, where citizens encounter and engage them every day of their lives. Public art has a rich and storied history, dating at least from the classical era right up into the Renaissance. Consider the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome, or Ghiberti's magnificent Gates of Paradise. Both the city of Paris itself and the critical heights of European industrial era ingenuity are epitomized in the unmistakable form of the Eiffel Tower. Even today, public art continues to evolve. In 2005, Christo and Jeanne-Claude conceived and executed a massive installation artwork entitled The Gates, consisting of 7,503 saffron-colored panels arching over 23 miles of public walkways in New York's Central Park. Aesthetically, the success of The Gates lies in its harmonious interplay of color and composition. The vibrant saffron-orange fabric conveys energy, which is amplified by the natural movement of the material in the wind. Further, the orange against the ashen grey background of Manhattan in the winter is especially fresh and invigorating. In contrast, The Gates also elicits a serene, calming effect through repetition, with over 7,000 individuals banners blustering in graceful arches. Together, the dynamism of its energy and steadiness of flow work to keep the viewer engaged and moving - both of which are elemental to a successful work of art. Beyond the success of its composition, the installation of The Gates is a public park intrinsically influences how we encounter and react to it. Regardless of one's interest in the work, to any New Yorker passing by Central Park during its display, it could not be avoided or ignored. It compels the viewer to react, and ponder its purpose and meaning. As public art, it acts as an ephemeral social equalizer, briefly dissolving teh distance between the homeless man and the business man. Both have free acces to The Gates, both are equally entitled to encounter and to interpret it. Passage 2 Few critics will deny that the transgrsesive idea for the sake of transgression has often been the operative principle in the modern evolution of art. And it is not nearly so much the writerly platitudes and sober dialectrics of past eras that embody the trend of visual art in the 20th and 21st centuries as it is the anarchist battle - cry of Mikhail Bakunin that "the passion for destruction is also a creative passion." To speak generally, crossing boundaries in order to expand the fields of our consciousness has been accepted in our contemporary culture as a vital component (and indeed, perhaps the only remaining component) demarcating a line between art and object, between ideation and decoration. However, there is an implied value to this perspective that few - artists and critics alike - will care to acknowledge. Boundaries matter. It is well known that this naunce essentially eluded the likes of Marcel Duchamp and his Dadaist zealots. If we were to accept, as they did, that indeed there is no intrinsic quality - no inelectable aspect of creation, or innovation, or craft - that defines "art" outside of being described as exactly that, the very notion of aesthetics collapses upon itself; for such a world is necessarily predicated on the principle that either everything is art, or else it is not.. And I fear that it must be the latter. The pluralistic ignorance of our "art-is-whatever-the-artist-says-it-is" society has reached a new and too infrequently criticized summit in the latest charade of self-described artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, ''The Gates of Central Park. The distinctive fabric used in the ''The Gates" was not sewn or dyed by the artists; the posts holding them aloft were not welded or painted by the artists. In this sense alone, Christo and Jeanne - Claude may be considered artists to the same extent that one is an artist in selecting new drapes for a sitting room. But more important (and more brazen) is the setting chosen by Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their pseudo-aesthetic stunt. Most every person who has walked the paths and bridges of Central Park - chiefly conceived by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux - and appreciated both the thoughtfulness and elegance of its design will readily agree that it is, already, a work of public art. To dress it, even for a day, in the costume of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's creatively bankrupt brand of expressionist pretension is tantamount to drawing a mustache on the Mona-Lisa - a ploy, in fact, already executed by Duchamp in his insipid 1919 "object trouvé," L.H.O.O.Q. It would perhaps make for an apt cautionary tale to Christo and Jeanne-Claude to realize that less than one hundred years later, the sophomoric antics of Duchamp are all but forgotten, whereas after half a millennium, da Vinci's painting remains one of the most iconic works of art in the Western world.